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Martin Heidegger: the philosopher who fell for Hitler
Martin Heidegger is regarded by some as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. He was also a Nazi recently exposed as an anti-Semite in his private Black Notebooks. Can his thought be saved from his politics, asks Michael Inwood?
Last month saw another flare-up in the ongoing controversy regarding the philosopher Martin Heidegger. The German thinker is Janus-faced. On the one hand, he is lauded by his admirers as the greatest mind of the 20th century. On the other hand, he was a Nazi and a participant – even if a minor one – in the greatest evil of recent times.
Ever since his death in 1976, the continuing publication of his writings (which now exceed 100 volumes) have provided disturbing disclosures of the depth of his implication in National Socialism. The latest revelations have emerged from his “Black Notebooks” – so called because of the colour of their binding. The Black Notebooks were a philosophical diary written between 1931 until the 1970s, whose publication was authorised by Heidegger only after the appearance of all his other works. In the volumes covering 1931-41, which have just been published in Germany, Heidegger described Jews as having “a talent for calculation”, and of opposing the Nazis’ racial theories despite “having lived according to the race principle for longest”.
There were other reasons, apart from anti-Semitism, for the appeal of Nazism to Germans – reasons less apparent now than they were at the time. And so therefore it had been possible, until the recent revelations, to assume that Heidegger, if not exactly a good man fallen among thieves, was not a fully fledged anti-Semite. He had good relationships with his Jewish pupils such as Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Blochmann, and there are no overt racist statements in his public pronouncements and work published during his lifetime. But the Black Notebooks reveal a new aspect of Heidegger: the belief that “World Judaism” was a driving force in the dehumanisation of the modern world – a dehumanisation that involved Bolshevism, “Americanism” and, as Heidegger came to believe by the mid-Thirties (but not express publically), Fascism itself.
Heidegger’s exposure leaves awkward questions for the many admirers of the philosopher – more numerous in France and Germany than in the English-speaking world. Heidegger himself had little time for England, which he blamed for its supposed complicity with the parlous state of the world. “What else,” he wrote, “besides engineering and metaphysically paving the way for socialism, besides commonplace thinking and tastelessness, has England contributed in terms of 'culture’?” With a pleasing touch of egocentricity he also wrote: “Can it be a coincidence that in England alone my thoughts and questions have been consistently rejected in the last decade and no translation has even been attempted?”
Now there are translations galore of his work into English – including one by the film director Terrence Malick – and he is a regular fixture in philosophy departments around the world. But the key questions will not go away. How deeply ingrained was anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s psyche? Was it a fleeting response to war as his Anglophobia was? Or was it more deeply embedded in his thought?
Some of Heidegger’s claims in the Black Notebooks are startling. Take this example: “World Judaism, incited by the emigrés let go from Germany, is everywhere elusive and in the unfolding of its power it does not need to get involved in military action anywhere, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.” How could such a clever man believe such absurdities?
Martin Heidegger was born in Messkirch, a small town in southern Germany, in 1889. This was the same year the same year as Hitler and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the latter his principal competitor for the position of best philosopher of the 20th century.
He was the son of Catholic peasants and his education was supported by the Church in preparation for the priesthood. In 1909 he left the Freiburg secondary school, where his interest in philosophy was first aroused, and he became a Jesuit novice, but was soon discharged owing to heart trouble. He entered Freiburg University to read theology and underwent a crisis of faith that led him to break off his training for the priesthood and turn to philosophy. He was influenced by Edmund Husserl, a German thinker born in 1859 who was soon to become the leading figure of the phenomenological movement, dedicated to the description and investigation of our conscious experience without reference to its extra-mental causes and consequences.
Soon after Heidegger’s thesis earned him the right to lecture in the university, his academic career was interrupted by the First World War. In 1915 he was conscripted but deemed unsuitable for combat and assigned to the postal and meteorological services. (This safe haven, while his friends and compatriots were dying on the battlefield, left him with a lifelong burden of guilt.) In 1917 he married a Protestant woman and two years later, after the birth of their first son, he announced his breach with the “system of Catholicism”. On his discharge from the army he became a lecturer at Freiburg and won fame as a teacher of dazzling brilliance and insight. His lectures on Aristotle, St Paul, St Augustine, Luther as well as those on the world of everyday experience, earned him acclaim as the “hidden king of philosophy”. They also won him a position at Marburg, where he befriended the Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann and began a lifelong intense relationship with Hannah Arendt – who would later write a famous book about the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and coin the phrase “banality of evil” – that survived Nazism, war and exile.
In the spring of 1927 Heidegger published his first great book, Being and Time. It was immediately recognised as a work of immense originality and importance. Other philosophers of the time were primarily concerned with epistemology and the foundations of the sciences; they often spoke as if we were separated from the real world by a screen of “representations” or “sense-data”; they tended to regard our approach to the world as one of disinterested observation.
Heidegger’s concern, by contrast, was with ontology, the nature of beings, above all humans. The central question for him was “What is being? What is it for something to be?” He tackled this question not by way of the sciences, but by way of an examination of our pre-scientific daily life. We are, he argued, not cut off from the world by our mental processes: we are “in the world”, in direct contact with our surroundings. Nor are we simply passive observers; the objects that surround us are “ready-to-hand”, instruments of use, tools for doing something: hammer, nails, leather, workbench, all together forming a network of significance, constituting a local world and emitting rays of significance towards the larger world beyond. “The essence of the human being lies in its existence,” he wrote. Our approach to the world is governed by care and by moods; everyone cares, even the careless, carefree and uncaring, and everyone is in a certain mood. All human beings interpret themselves and are to that extent incipient philosophers. We are generally “inauthentic”, doing and believing what one does and believes. But sometimes we ascend to “authenticity”, choosing to do our own thing, a feat that is especially encouraged by an awareness of the inevitability of one’s own death.
Humans alone among the animals are aware of death, since we alone are “temporal”, reaching back into the past and anticipating the future. Our temporality helps to explain how we alone have a certain distance or “elbow room” with respect to other beings, how we have freedom from our immediate surroundings, and how we alone become aware of our position as a being among the whole of beings, and can therefore engage in philosophy.
In 1928 Heidegger succeeded Husserl to take a chair at Freiburg, and in his inaugural lecture made a pronouncement that earned him a reputation as an archetypal metaphysician with his claim that our awareness of beings as a whole depends on our experience of dread in the face of nothingness.
Shortly after Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in 1933, Heidegger was elected rector of Freiburg. In his inaugural address he supported the Gleichschaltung or “coordination” of the university with the new regime: the duties of a student were now also to include labour and military service. But although Heidegger co-operated with the Nazis he tempered their cruder aspects. He resigned as rector after a year, owing to conflicts with the faculty and with Party officials. He did not perform the near-impossible feat of leaving the Party, but he played no further part in political affairs. He lectured on Nietzsche over several years, presenting him as a “metaphysician” – a quite different Nietzsche from the racist and authoritarian Nietzsche favoured by Hitler. In the autumn of 1944, he was drafted into the Volkssturm, the German “Dads’ Army”, to dig anti-tank ditches along the Rhine. After Germany’s defeat he was summoned before the Freiburg Denazification Commission which forbade him to teach, though he was allowed to keep his library, his pension and an emeritus professorship. The teaching ban lasted until 1949.
Heidegger’s later comments on his Nazi involvement were enigmatic and unapologetic. He compared the Holocaust to factory farming, a symptom of the modern condition rather than a specifically German crime.
Martin Heidegger in the 1950s, shortly after he was allowed to resume teaching philosophy Credit: Mondadori
After the war, Heidegger developed the ideas in Being and Time in novel directions. In particular, he dissociated himself from the humanist existentialism of his admirer, Jean-Paul Sartre. The human being is not, as Being and Time had appeared to suggest, the centre of the world, and, contrary to Sartre, man does not “make himself”. Being now assumes a somewhat god-like role and human beings are the “shepherd of Being”. In Being and Time he hints that the world itself is out of joint. He elaborated this into an account of how technology threatens to transform the world, and even ourselves, into a stock of resources to be calculated, manipulated and exploited. He turned to art and poetry to provide a possible refuge from technology.
“Only a god can save us”, said Heidegger (echoing Plato) in 1966. He was still waiting for the god to come when he died on May 26 1976 and was buried in the churchyard at Messkirch beside his parents. At the Catholic mass held in his memory, the priest quoted Jeremiah 1: 7: “But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child; for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak”.
Heidegger’s repellent political beliefs do not contaminate his philosophical work. His writings are of intrinsic worth and interest; they show few, if any, signs of political involvement; and they are at odds with central Nazi beliefs such as biological racism and a conspiracy view of history. Nowadays Heidegger’s thought is too deeply implicated in European philosophy to be extracted from it: not only philosophers fell under his influence – Sartre, Derrida, Foucault – but also such theologians as Bultmann, Rahner and Tillich. But Heidegger the man is still an enigma. What did he expect from Nazism? Perhaps the establishment of Plato’s ideal city. But he lacked Plato’s sense of humour. Why did he authorise the publication of the Black Notebooks? Perhaps he wanted to defy the finality of death by being read and discussed after his bodily demise. He arranged the publication of his notes and lectures in stages for this purpose. He came to realise that his Nazism, far from being an obstacle to this project, could be exploited to serve it. His philosophical writings would need to be explored in order to make sense of their mysterious author. Like the Greek hero, Achilles, Heidegger aspired to eternal renown. So far the plan seems to be working.
Michael Inwood teaches philosophy at Oxford and is the author of A Very Short Introduction to Heidegger (Oxford)
